I wouldn't call the streak breaker a cheat due to it being used also for misses. I remember that I had a miss streak of 9 times in a row, on a yellow -con lt, then I was able to hit once, then back to missing. However, later in levels such as l35 and above I never noticed when I missed or if I ever did.
However, I wouldn't call it a cheat for the player. More like trying to keep combat normalized.
I'm not sure what you mean by "normalized" but the streakbreaker was put in there explicitly because of complaints that players had that they did not like missing many times in a row, even if that behavior was entirely correct for the random chance to hit. People tend to think that if there's a 10% chance of hitting, they will hit exactly or very nearly one time in ten. But that's not the case. Random chance says that sometimes you'll hit three out of five and sometimes you'll miss fifty times in a row. Both of those have somewhat similar chances of happening: about one in 176 to hit three out of five, about one in 194 to miss fifty times in a row. Given how many times a player attacks in an hour, in a day, in a year, the odds of this happening are actually very high, but people notice and remember the long string of misses more - and estimate the odds against it happening extremely poorly. In fact, given the number of players and the total amount of combat that occurred in the history of the game, I'm positive there was some unlucky player that managed to miss one hundred times in a row.
The devs decided to implement the streakbreaker to reduce the maximum possible miss streak any player could experience given a particular tohit chance to something they felt intuitively seemed reasonable. So if your chance tohit was 90%, the streakbreaker would allow one miss, but the next swing would automatically hit because it would not allow two misses in a row. Different tohit allowed different maximum miss streaks.
This has nothing to do with "normalizing" combat. That implies that missing many times in a row is not normal or statistically proper. The streakbreaker de-normalized combat by increasing the number of hits and reducing the maximum possible miss streak. Interestingly, because it affected all attackers including NPCs, it also had the net effect of making defense - for players and NPCs alike - slightly weaker than expected, particularly for intermediate values of defense. If you had strong defense and could bring net overall tohit below 20%, then the streakbreaker was for all practical purposes non-existent - it would tolerate miss streaks of up to 100 misses. But at, say, 30% to 40% it would only allow 6 miss streaks. The odds of missing seven times in a row against something with net 30% tohit is about one in 12. That means the streakbreaker could be adding hits on a scale of as often as one out of every seventy swings or so - about 1.4% of the time. So if you had 20% defense, the streakbreaker could be having the net effect of reducing that defensive mitigation by 1.4 out of 20 or about 7 percent of the total strength of the defense (its more complicated than that, but you get the idea).
Not the kind of thing players would notice overall, but the effect was there, and measurable if you knew how to look.
